In all my years......I have never....

19 years. That's how long I have lived in Bragg Creek. In all my years I have seen a few black bears, a grizzly, lots of moose, a literal herd of deer, elk, coyotes, marten, squirrels, owls, hawks, even an eagle or two. But never had I ever seen a cougar. I had heard of them in the area, I had talked to friends and neighbors who caught glimpses of them running across the road. But never had I ever been able to sit less than 50 feet away (in a car)from two of them feeding on a fresh kill.

At 10:30 last thursday night by friend and neighbor texted me and said " what are you doing?" When I said watching TV he simply said...."get over here". I am convinced that he would have said get over here if I said I was doing anything aside from active CPR on someone, alas I digress.... When I got to his place we hopped in his car and drove 200 meters down the road and , what you see above is what we saw that night. Truly a once in a life time opportunity.

Not quite as exciting to the general populous as seeing one of  North Americas fiercest hunters but just as exciting for me....my new starter came in. But before I wanted to put the starter in place I had a couple of other things on my to do list

This is where the starter mounts on to the flywheel housing. If you look inside you'll see the ring gear where the starter engages and turns the engine over. This is significant right now because of the tachometer.

I know about now you are scratching your head and saying....."what???"

Allow me to go back in time. There are two ways to run your tach, off the alternator or a sensor that counts the teeth on your fly wheel...called a Halls effect sensor I think.  However....when you switch out an engine your calibration is all shot as your ring gear is different etc. So when I swapped out the engine back in 2011 from a gas to a  diesel I wasn't able to hook up the tach as it didn't have the ability to be switched from working with an 8 cyl gas engine to a 6 cyl diesel . A subsequent search found that I could not find a diesel tach that matched my instrument cluster. I remained optimistic and persistent....and maybe stubborn as well. I found an after market piece of tech that will take the signal from the sensor and convert it to work in the tach meant for a gas engine. The trick is you have to know how many teeth are on your ring gear to set up the conversion properly. Up until now I put it low on my list of things "to do", I wasn't going to pull the starter just to count the teeth, but now out of necessity....here we are. 

I was going to have to enlist the help of my lovely side kick. My partner in life, my buddy.....my sweetheart who really doesn't like to get herself dirty , greasy, or to generally "smell like bus"

So before I conscript her to crawl under the engine and count teeth on the ring gear I must make the environment as hospitable as possible. While I was removing the old starter I noticed that my flex pipe in the exhaust system was.....well.... toast. So I need to remove the exhaust and repair it. Seems like a good time.

Once it was out it was a quick fix and I still managed to have a piece of 4" flex pipe kicking around. Before I put it back in though, it was a good time to get Michelle. Without the exhaust there was more room for the task at hand.

I put down a clean carpet, got her some coveralls, a bright lite....I even had classical music playing on the radio!

At this point I had to remove the rear shroud for the engine bay so that I could access the flywheel in order to turn the engine and advance the ring gear so Michelle could count. As I mentioned in the previous post, this was the point where I realized I recognized the wiring harness that was responsible for my battery drain. The voltage regulator!!

Ring gear counted, starter put in place, exhaust fixed and now reinstalled. I'm just waiting for a new regulator and we should be good......

Except for the damn fuel shut off solenoid....

 

Send your worries away

 Monday nights are the meeting of the "one loop, two pints group". Basically a bunch of 50ish Dads that want to get out and hit the mountain bike trails, be active and have a group of guys that you're held accountable to if you try and bail.  We will go out for an hour or two and then have a pint at the local pub. This summer has been a great one for wildlife on the rides. A month or two ago we came across a grizzly , last week we saw a momma moose.....I wonder what the future will bring??

As summer turned to fall and in the foothills of the Rockies winter is a short time from that, the thought of winter tires played on my mind. What also played on my mind is where I store my winter tires (on the roof of my shop) and how I get them up there(I hoof them up on my shoulder one by one up the ladder. Being that my teenage workhorse has left the proverbial nest, and I'm not getting any younger. I decided to work smarter not harder. So I fashioned a swing arm tire lift(crane) 

This is just another example of the fact that I weld, but I am not so bold as to say I am a welder

My welds aren't pretty but they do the job!

I still need to do a little electrical work to extend my control module for the lift but, in time.....in time.

Now back to my battery drain. In the last post I started to search for the source of the drain on the engine battery. I didn't get to far into the search when I stumbled across another (significant) problem of the cracked starter mount. I have ordered a new starter and while I wait I decided to continue my search for the elusive electric parasite. I shut everything off and then placed my multimeter in line on the negative side of the battery and you can see the drain.

I then kept the technique simple and started pulling fuses and watching the meter. I went through every fuse and every relay and found nothing! I checked and re-checked and came up with the same result.

I decided to dig a little deeper and make sure I was getting all feeds. When I pulled my fuse panel away to study the battery isolator, that is when I spotted it. A line running to the engine side of the isolator with an inline fuse. When I pulled the fuse, my drain disappeared. The wires were wrapped in a very distinctive shrink wrap. I remembered installing the wiring harness but I couldn't remember from what....furnace....speakers?

 This picture jumps ahead a tile or two of the dominoes that fell as a result of searching for the battery drain, but sufficed to say that I needed to remove the rear engine shroud to count teeth.....yes, yes I get the irony of my statement but it will make sense in a subsequent post. But when I did remove the rear I spotted the familiar wiring harness immediately.

Turns out the wiring harness was for the alternator and the voltage regulator. Again I tested. When I unplugged the voltage regulator the drain went away. When I left the regulator plugged in but unplugged the alternator...the drain remained. So I am very confident that replacing the regulator will take all my troubles away...